Monday morning, Twitter began banning accounts which glorify violence and/or promote racial/religious/sexual/ethnic hostility. It’s a premeditated purge that is widely seen as an attempt to reduce the prominence of white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis on the platform.
One of the accounts that has disappeared, observers of the far right noticed, belonged to the faux-intellectual white-pride publication American Renaissance. As BuzzFeed’s Joe Bernstein documented here, an American Renaissance staffer collaborated on a number of pieces about race that were published by former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s Breitbart site. The personal account of Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, who recently celebrated Bannon’s praise for an infamous white-supremacist novel called The Camp of the Saints, has also been terminated.
Another banned account belonged to white nationalist Jayda Fransen of the fringe Britain First party, whose name you may recall because on Nov. 29 Donald Trump retweeted three videos she’d posted which purported to show Muslims committing anti-white hate crimes. (Reports indicate that at least two of the three videos were circulated in misleading fashion and do not actually depict religious violence.) Fransen has previously been convicted of harassing a Muslim woman in the U.K. and recently spoke at a far-right event in Poland that was formally condemned as a “fascist march” by the European Union Parliament.
What a bummer for Trump and Bannon, losing all these great accounts on the same morning! Mondays, am I right?
